World of the Starwolves by Edmond Hamilton

"Were there guards in there?" Dilullo asked.

"There were," said Chane.  "Two of them.  And to answer your next question, I didn't kill them.  I was a good little Earthman like you said, and only stunned them."

Today is the day we bid our farewells to exiled space pirate Morgan Chane and space mercenary captain John Dilullo, the principals of Edmond Hamilton's Starwolf trilogy, three paperback space operas from Ace printed in 1967 and '68 with Jack Gaughan covers.  I am reading the third and final volume, World of the Starwolves, in the 1982 omnibus edition I bought in Iowa in 2015.  If you need a refresher course on Chane and Dilullo, check out my blog posts on Starwolf #1, The Weapon from Beyond and Starwolf #2, The Closed Worlds.

The Starwolves of planet Varna have committed another crime against galactic civilization!  Varna is a planet with high gravity, so the strain of humans who live there are super strong, so they can accelerate their spaceships faster than other humans--this makes them almost unstoppable space pirates.  Their latest exploit is stealing a famous work of art, a mobile of forty large one-of-a-kind synthetic jewels; each jewel represents one of the biggest stars in the Milky Way and each produces its own distinct musical tone, the forty tones adding up to a beautiful symphony.  (It is fun when SF writers try to conceive of "the art of the future"--remember Robert Silverberg's The Second Trip?)

Morgan Chane's parents were Earthborn, but he was raised on Varna and has super strength himself, and before a spat led to his exile, he lived the life of an interstellar bandito alongside the hairy Varnans.  Thus when he says the Starwolves couldn't care less about art and will tear the mobile apart and sell the forty jewels separately, you can believe him.  He also knows to whom they will sell them.  You see, planet Varna is in the Argo Spur, where there are a bunch of particularly corrupt and anarchic star systems.  The Starwolves don't raid these systems, but instead sell them the stuff they steal from further afield.  In return, the worlds of the Argo Spur have let it be known that if the decent systems of the galaxy were ever to band together and muster an allied fleet to nuke Varna and solve the Starwolf problem once and for all, the Argo Spur worlds would quickly throw together their own fleet to defend Varna's sovereignty.

The rightful owners of the mobile are willing to pay a lot of moolah to get the masterpiece back, and with his intimate knowledge of Starwolf operations and the Argo Spur, Chane thinks he can guide a team of mercenaries to the jewels and retrieve them so they can get that sweet reward.  In the first chapter of World of the Starwolves, Chane convinces John Dilullo, who retired from the mercenary captaining business a few months ago, to get back in the merc game, and by Chapter II they and a crew of mercs are in a spacecraft, infiltrating the Spur.

While in the Argo Spur the mercs will try to pass as asteroid miners, so they stop in an asteroid field to gather some ore to make their cover more believable.  The swarm of asteroids Chane chooses is one used by an ancient alien race as a sort of cemetery or memorial--many of the asteroids are carved into cyclopean statues of cthuloid monsters.  (This reminded me a little of Gene Wolfe's 2007 story "Memorare.")

Chane and Dilullo do detective work and get into fights on a few Spur worlds and eventually discover that the Starwolves sold the forty jewels to five or six different parties, but then a mysterious race of aesthetes, the Qajar, living on a planet few know about, Chalann, acquired all forty and reassembled the mobile for exhibition in their gallery of galactic art treasures.  When the mercs try to sneak onto Chalann to get the mobile they are repelled and barely escape with their lives.  They are even imprisoned by a crime boss who helped finance their attack on Chalann.  Doh!

Things are looking pretty bleak--the crime boss may even hand the mercs over to the Qajar, who are expert torturers!  Chane then hits on a radical solution--enlisting the Starwolves to help him attack Chalann!

He had tried to be a good Earthman with the Mercs.  But he was not a good Earthman.

He was a Starwolf and he was going home.

Chane, by himself, escapes captivity and goes to Varna, and we readers learn more about the people of Varna and Chane's youth among them.

Anybody with access to an internet connection knows that the world is full of people who love cats. Well, the members of the SF community are not immune to this predilection, and so SF is full of cat people.  Flash Gordon meets Lion Men, Larry Niven and Poul Anderson have cat people in their extensive future histories, there are lots of cat people in that cartoon about the long-suffering undead wizard Mumm-ra, and on and on.  I tell you this, of course, as a preamble to telling you that the people of Varna, while human, evolved in a different direction from Earth humans, and are covered in down and have slanty eyes that glow and so are, essentially, even if Hamilton doesn't come right out and say it, cat people.  The most obvious hints are when Chane meets up with the flirty and promiscuous woman he, before his exile, had a sort of thing with: we are told she looks "like a beautiful panther" and that being kissed by her "is like being kissed by a tigress."

As for the plot, while many people on Varna like Chane and are happy to see him back, and many others are indifferent, one clan of Starwolves wants to kill Chane because on the last of the many pirate raids he participated in he killed (in self-defense) a native Varnan who was trying to take from Chane some of Chane's legitimate share of the loot.  So, when Chane turns up, this clan challenges Chane to a sort of formalized feud, what you might call a judicial fight to the death or trial by combat.  Science fiction is full of people fighting in the arena, and I fully expected Hamilton to give us one or more scenes of Chane battling a feline pirate before a crowd of cheering onlookers.  But Chane manages to convince the Varnan elders to authorize a major raid on Chalann by a large fleet, and they postpone the resolution of the feud until after the raid.

There are some Starwolf losses, but the raid is a success.  Chane not only guides the Starwolves to victory, he escapes from the clutches of the clan that hates him and snatches the mobile and makes his way to the crime boss's planet to free the mercs.  Chane leaves the world of his birth behind him, along with the dangerous feud and the panther-like wench, and embraces a life among the stars with his mentor John Dilullo and other men who share his Earth blood and can teach him Earth mores.

World of the Starwolves is an entertaining space opera.  The heist caper plot and all the attendant chases, escapes, fights and detective stuff are fun, as are the strange planets and alien creatures and all the gadget and space scenes.  The character stuff also works; for example, Dilullo and Chane don't just head to the Spur because they desire money, but for psychological reasons related to their feelings about home--while Chane is homesick for the Spur, and, ultimately, Varna, Dilullo doesn't feel comfortable in his native Brindisi because those he loved when he lived there are no longer alive.  Chane and Dilulo are both men who have lost a home but found a friend with whom to share a life of adventure in space.

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I have read many space operas by Edmond Hamilton over the course of this blog's life.  And many more lie in the future of MPorcius Fiction Log!  Edmond Hamilton was a professional writer who churned out speculative fiction adventures like one-man sword and ray pistol factory!  But first we'll check out some 1970s stories billed as "works of horror, supernatural horror, the macabre, and the generally weird."